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A woman grieves. Sienna has been broken up with her ex for some time, but she's still heartbroken. She's tried everything to get past her ex, but to no avail. Luckily, she lives in L.A., and there is no shortage of spiritual seekers with remedies to try. When her friend Ruthie says there's nothing left but to sit shiva, Sienna decides to go for it and hosts one for her ex, despite not being Jewish. Desperate for Sienna to move on, her friends agree to go along with the unconventional scheme. But a special guest guru shows up, styling himself as a guide to Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and death. The collision of cultural and religious traditions opens up a bacchanalia of "healing," as everyone tries out the different methods to heal the spirit. But Sienna still remains heartbroken, realizing there's nothing left she can do but face down her grief. Directed and written by Scottie Thompson, this outlandish but emotionally grounded short dramedy captures one woman's attempts to get over her ex, both lampooning modern spiritual self-development culture in the media age and sensitively portraying the way grief can take root in someone and prove hard to get past. It clearly has lighthearted fun gently satirizing a "wellness" landscape rife with influencers, self-styled gurus and straight-up New Age looniness. But it also takes its main character's heartache seriously, making for an emotionally relatable story in the end. Shot with a warm, golden Californian sunniness and paced briskly with an eye for the absurd, the storytelling quickly sets up Sienna's heartbreak as well as her many varied attempts to get over her ex-boyfriend. Then she expediently lands on one final desperate solution: she will sit shiva for her lost love, using the Jewish custom for grieving to grieve her ex. Her community gathers around her, all hoping once and for all for their friend to stop talking about her ex. They're also all nutty in their own ways, with their own spiritual remedies for anguish and suffering, even bringing along a guru for the Hindu deity Shiva for good measure. The structure of the humor is clearly a pile-on of absurdity after absurdity, revealing the writing's good-humored but sharp eye for cultural appropriation and ear for the ludicrous. Name any recent New Age wellness trend and many pop up in the emerging potpourri of Sienna's sit. Everyone is so enamored of a quick path to nirvana that the event threatens to turn into an orgy of spiritual bliss, making for a very funny, very L.A. kind of circus. But just as we think we've lost track of Sienna, actor Scottie Thompson keeps us rooted in her distress, which intensifies until it hits her breaking point. This emotional grounding in a very real, relatable situation is what helps wind SIENNA AND THE SIT down to a surprisingly moving, even graceful ending, as she finally gets what she needs. Finally realizing she can't spiritually bypass growth, she faces her grief head on, discovering that grief is something you must go through, not around. But with her community surrounding her, she's not alone, and she's carried out of the narrow tunnel back into the light, with the help of her friends. SIENNA AND THE SIT. Courtesy of Scottie Thompson at http://merdemagic.com.